New method of early screening for colorectal cancer

Professor Xu Ruihua's team collected circulating tumor DNA extracted from plasma from 801 patients with colorectal cancer and 1,021 normal controls, and screened nine methylated markers that could be used to diagnose colorectal cancer, as well as five methylated markers that predicted the prognosis of colorectal cancercirculating tumor DNA is a small fragment of the genome released into the circulatory system by tumor cells, a characteristic tumor biomarker, like a "fingerprint" left by tumor cellsthis study shows that the accuracy of colorectal cancer diagnostic models based on circulating tumor DNA methylation markers is 96%, while the accuracy of the current clinically commonly used colorectal cancer serum marker cancer antigen CEA is only 67%In addition, the accuracy of the new prognosis model for patient survival prediction is significantly higher than that of the current clinically commonly used prognostic indicators, which means that doctors can use it to treat different patients with colorectal cancer with more personalized and precise treatmentThe researchers also conducted both colonoscopy screening and detection of DNA methylation markers in 1,493 patients at high risk of colorectal cancerThe results showed that the sensitivity of the latter detected early bowel cancer was as high as 89.7%, the sensitivity of the developmental adenoma (precancerous lesions) was also 33.3%, and the patient compliance was better, which provided a new noninvasive method for early screening of colorectal cancer.